The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-term Health is a non-fiction nutritional science book written by T. Colin Campbell, PhD and his son Thomas M. Campbell II, MD. Originally published in 2005 with a "Revised and Expanded Edition" released in 2016, it has been called one of the most important books about diet and health ever written.
The title refers to the China-Cornell-Oxford Project that spanned two decades and examined the mortality rates from cancer and an assortment of chronic diseases between 1973 and 1975 across 65 counties in China. These data were then correlated with dietary surveys and blood work from a hundred people in each of these counties between 1983 and 1984. As a professor of biochemistry at Cornell University, the elder doctor Campbell was involved in the project along with experts from University of Oxford and Chinese health officials. The study was exceptional in factoring for genetic variables, as all participants were the same ethnicity with essentially identical genetic risk factors.
The data analysis showed that people who eat a predominantly whole-food, plant-based diet and avoid processed foods with refined carbohydrates will avoid, reduce, or reverse the development of numerous diseases. Based on the findings, Campbell conducted tests on laboratory mice at Cornell's Division of Nutritional Sciences for years, confirming the effects of specific proteins on the behavior of cancerous tumors. The authors state that eating foods which contain any cholesterol is unhealthy, and that the protein found in milk from mammals (casein) is "the most significant carcinogen we consume."
Hostile critics have nit-picked the data analysis and questioned some exceptions in it, but nutrition scientists in general have found the evidence presented to be compelling and the authors' conclusions to be sound.
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